A Writer's Life (21 page)

Considering these and other options, Nicola decided that he was forced to remain where he was. He had already sunk $150,000 of his own money into Gnolo, and while this was considerably less than his partners' investment, they nevertheless recognized him as the restaurant's boss; they voiced their opinions, strongly at times, but permitted him final authority. And furthermore, he told Linda, there was no way that this run of bad luck would continue. He challenged her to rise above her negative feelings and convince herself that better times were ahead.

But they were not. Business did not improve and the restaurant remained a magnet for misfortune and misadventure. One evening in February 1985, a prominent business executive and frequent customer, while dining at Gnolo with his inamorata, was spotted through the restaurant's front window by a private detective. Nicola soon received a subpoena that required him to take a few days off from work in order to be available as a courtroom witness in an adultery suit filed by the executive's wife. In March 1985, a customer tripped going down the staircase en route to the bathroom, and Nicola was again legally notified, this time for liability. In May, having survived the winter, Nicola looked forward to warmer weather, to more people strolling through the side streets, to more walk-in customers. His business did, in fact, seem to be picking up slightly. At the end of May—on May 30, to be precise—he was delighted to review his reservation list and notice that Gnolo was entirely booked for the evening ahead. All the tables on the main floor were reserved, and a private party numbering close to one hundred guests would be assembling on the second floor.

Early in the afternoon, as Nicola was overseeing his staff's preparations for the upstairs event, he became aware of the sounds of fire engines in the near distance, and the shouting of many people gathered outside. Then his chef, who had been tuned in to the news on the kitchen radio, hurried into the dining room to announce what he had heard: A woman was now pinned under a construction crane that had capsized just west of the restaurant, on Third Avenue north of Sixty-third Street. The woman had been walking on the sidewalk on the west side of the avenue, adjacent
to an open lot on which a forty-two-floor apartment house was being erected, and, as the crane collapsed against a plywood barrier while hoisting a load of steel rods, she fell under the barrier. She was alive but immobilized. Both of her legs were partly severed below the knees.

Throughout the afternoon and into the early evening, Nicola stood among thousands of onlookers along the barricaded Third Avenue, hoping that the rescue squads would be able to remove the woman without her sustaining further injury. Many spectators watched from the windows and rooftops of nearby buildings. Hundreds of media representatives were on hand to film and recount the ordeal of the forty-nine-year-old woman, who remained conscious and lucid while restrained for nearly six hours under the weight of the fallen barrier and the crane. Finally, after patiently digging through the debris and pulling away the last of the impediments, the rescuers slowly lifted the woman onto a stretcher and placed her in a nearby ambulance. Some spectators applauded. Others watched in respectful silence. The police, having already banned all motor traffic from the area except for official vehicles, now closed off a mile and a half of the FDR Drive to facilitate the speedy delivery of the woman downtown to Bellevue Hospital, where a team of surgeons awaited her. They would later devote five hours to the repair and reattachment of her crushed bones. At the conclusion, a hospital spokesman announced that it was uncertain if the woman would ever regain the full use of her legs.

Nicola returned home that night with much sympathy for the woman, but also a little sympathy for himself. The day and night blockage of Gnolo's neighborhood had nullified what would have been a lucrative occasion for the restaurant. When I walked into its near-empty dining room a few nights later, Nicola told me that he and his wife were barely communicating, and that his partners were pleading with him to close the place down. The crane accident had cast a pall along the street, they said, and with summer approaching and New Yorkers often out of town, the future for Gnolo was hardly auspicious. I and my good friend A. E. Hotchner—well known as the author of
Papa Hemingway
, a biography describing the adventurous life and suicidal death of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway—contacted many of our fellow writers and acquaintances in the hope of rallying support for Gnolo. Very few people were swayed by our appeal. It is difficult to lure customers into a restaurant reeking of foreclosure. Still, Hotchner and I agreed to dine there together at least once a week, taking turns telephoning ahead for reservations, maintaining the courteous illusion that Gnolo was yet capable of having crowds of customers.

Shortly before 6:00 p.m. one day in early June, returning to Gnolo after a brief stroll in Central Park, Nicola was pleased to see that all the tables were set for dinner and to hear the sound system dispensing uptempo music. But there was not a single waiter in the dining room. After proceeding into the kitchen, Nicola realized that, except for the young Peruvian dishwasher, he was alone on the premises. The dishwasher, struggling with his English and clearly discomfitted, explained that the entire staff had walked out about a half hour before. They had been gathered in the kitchen, sampling what the chef was preparing for that night's menu, when suddenly one of the waiters proposed that they resign en masse, leaving at once this moribund atmosphere of unoccupied tables and deficient gratuities. They could easily find better jobs elsewhere, the waiter declared; moments later, having retrieved their clothing from their lockers, the six-man staff was out the door, leaving the key with the dishwasher and instructing him to pass it on to Nicola with their salutations.

Nicola was stunned. He watched silently as the dishwasher untied his apron and, after laying the key on the wooden counter, said good night and followed in the path of his colleagues. Putting the key in his pants pocket, Nicola slowly walked out to the bar and made himself a drink. He sat on a stool, staring out at rows of white linen-covered tables, each properly set with silverware, glasses, and folded napkins. He had opened Gnolo only eight months ago, and nothing that he had experienced in more than forty years of restaurant work could bring clarity and understanding to this moment. He would be sixty in less than two years, and, having invested the last of his savings in this debacle, his retirement was out of the question. He would have to keep working. But where?

Glancing through the big front window, he thought he spotted the novelist John Irving walking briskly along Sixty-third Street with his girlfriend, Rusty, who had an apartment a few blocks west on Park Avenue. The two of them had eaten a few times at Gnolo, but on this occasion they did not even pause to turn their heads to glance in; Rusty, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, appeared to be very unhappy. Nicola swung around on the stool and made himself another drink. Displayed on the backbar was a framed photograph inscribed to him by a renowned Hollywood comedian:
To Nick, my best … Bob Hope
. Hope had come in one night while visiting New York, and Elaine Kaufman could definitely not claim him as one of her own. Next to the picture of Bob Hope were several others taken during Gnolo's joyful inaugural month of October, including those of the Halloween Champagne Gala hosted here by Peter Rockefeller, Christina Oxenberg, and other social figures. Every inch of the restaurant, upstairs as well as downstairs, was packed that night with
young swells dressed in fairy-tale costumes, and nobody seemed eager to leave. This was a night when Nicola thought that owning Gnolo would make him rich.

Nicola heard the telephone but let it ring five or six times before getting up to answer it behind the bar.

“Gnolo's Restaurant,” he said in a loud voice.

“Hi, Nick, this is Gay,” I said, “and I need a table tonight.”

He began to laugh.

“What's so funny?”

“Oh, nothing much,” he replied after pausing for a second. From his end of the phone I could hear slightly what sounded like ice cubes clicking in a glass.

“How many you gonna be tonight?” he then asked.

“Just two,” I said. “Hotchner and myself.”

“When you want to come in?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“Fine,” he said. “See you at eight-thirty.”

When we arrived, we were greeted in the entranceway by a smiling Nicola, who escorted us to a table next to the front window, seating us with our backs to the rest of the dining room. As Nicola went off to get a gin and tonic for Hotchner and a dry gin martini for me, not having to be told what we wanted to drink, I sat for a moment staring directly across Sixty-third Street into the brightly lit tunnel leading down into the garage where I used to keep my '57 TR-3. Now I secure it, along with my equally pampered '71 Triumph Stag, in the dent-free garage of my home in southern New Jersey. The car that I then kept in New York, parking it in a different underground garage nearer to Lexington Avenue—and not caring how often the attendants might bang it up—was a Chrysler station wagon that my wife saw as ideal for transporting our daughters back and forth to college, until they came of age to borrow it and could nick it up themselves.

While waiting for our drinks, Hotchner and I conversed, as we invariably did, about the difficulties of our work and the fact that so many underachieving professional athletes are so highly paid. Neither of us commented on the desolateness of Gnolo's dining room because we had long been aware of and were sensitive to Nicola's difficulties, and also because Nicola decided, after delivering our drinks, to join us for dinner. He had actually proposed making our food selections for us, imploring us to leave everything to him, including the cooking; we agreed on the condition that he sit and eat with us.

The dinner was delightful, and Nicola's demeanor, especially after he
had consumed more than his share of the bottle of Chianti Classico that he had uncorked with the effortless flare of a professional, was as upbeat as the music flowing from the speakers. I was actually not aware that the three of us were the only individuals in the entire restaurant until, after completing our main course, I stood and turned to go to the men's room—and
that
is when it hit me: the glare of white linen rising above rows of empty tables before me, and more white material dangling from the sides of the front tables on the second floor, and suddenly I was able to identify with a phrase I had read in a
Times Magazine
article that I had clipped and filed away years ago. It was a piece by Gilbert Millstein, in which he described walking into an empty New York nightclub after 2:00 a.m. and becoming “snowblind from the tablecloths.”
Snowblind from the tablecloths!
—but exactly; and after Hotchner and I had walked home that night, we both guessed that we had attended the last supper at Gnolo.

The next afternoon, after I had telephoned Nicola to see how he was doing, he confirmed it.

“Me and my partners have decided to shut the place down,” he said. The restaurant history of Gnolo would conclude after only eight months. “Linda was right all along,” he added. “That building on Sixty-third Street is cursed.”

S
HORTLY AFTER THE CLOSING OF
G
NOLO
, N
ICOLA MOVED WITH HIS
family to Florida, never to return to New York. In Palm Beach, he found backers to finance another restaurant, but I did not visit it. To be perfectly frank, though frankness has never been my style, I made little effort during this time to remain in close contact with Nicola. I had grown weary of collecting information about restaurants; all that research, and no story to show for it. Bad luck had apparently infested Nicola's restaurant in Palm Beach as it had on Sixty-third Street. I did not know the details, and did not
want
to know the details, but he was obliged to go out of business and other investors later took over the space and turned it into a nightclub called Au Bar.

In 1991, while lodged at a small hotel in Calabria, working on the final sections of
Unto the Sons
, I heard references to Au Bar many times on Italian television, and it was also mentioned in newspapers, all in connection with a scandalous situation in the United States. A nephew of the late president John F. Kennedy had met a young woman one night at Au Bar, and, according to what she later told the police, he escorted her back to the Kennedy estate and raped her. Perhaps because I was in southern Italy, the spawning ground of the
Jettatura
, I began associating Au Bar with the jinx dust that seemed to cling to my friend Nicola no matter where he was. And during my returns to New York, whenever I passed 206 East 63rd Street, a site that Nicola's wife believed was “cursed,” it seemed to me that she was onto something. Each of the half dozen restaurants that would follow Gnolo at that address would encounter hard times. It was as if the building were carnivorous, devouring whatever restaurant tried to succeed on that spot.

After
Unto the Sons
was published in 1992, I thought of resuming my inquest into the restaurant world, but resisted. I needed a respite from research, I believed; perhaps I should try writing more from memory, less from the vantage point of an observer and interviewer. Soon I was outlining
an account of my college experiences during the years 1949 to 1953 at the then lily white University of Alabama, a memoir that I saw as continuing into 1965, when I returned as a
Times
staffer to interview the school's first black graduate, twenty-two-year-old Vivian Malone, and also to file stories about the civil rights demonstrations in the old cotton-growing community of Selma. I tried to re-create in my imagination the kind of person I had been back in the early autumn of 1949, a shy and uncertain teenager who, after being driven by his parents to a rail terminal in Philadelphia, embarked upon a twelve-hour journey through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and then into the Carolinas and Tennesseee and the northwestern tip of Georgia, and finally into Alabama. I had never before been far from home, and had no idea where Alabama was until my letter of acceptance from the University of Alabama prompted me to consult a map.